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Piecemeal transportation plan, or takeover strategy?

A U.S. Treasury report plays up the need for infrastructure investment, and while that doesn’t seem earth-shattering, the report also sends a message about the administration’s push to fund rail and livable community initiatives from the transportation funding stream. That leaves truckers wondering what will happen to their tax dollars in the future.

President Obama discussed findings from the latest Treasury report during a transportation forum at the White House on Monday, Oct. 11. Following the forum, the president reiterated his push for $50 billion in infrastructure investments including highways, rail and airport runways.

Participants at the forum included Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, former Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta and others.

While the attention to infrastructure is welcomed, the strategy of doing things piecemeal without a long-term highway bill has truckers wondering what will happen to the tax dollars they put into the Highway Trust Fund.

“Today, we got a little bit more of a forceful push from the president that he would fundamentally like to overhaul the way we fund our transportation investments. Some of that isn’t bad, but not all of it is good,” said OOIDA Director of Legislative Affairs Mike Joyce.

“The good is the focus on projects of regional and national significance,” he said. “Earmarks have gotten out of control. They have to be reined in, and they have to meet that threshold of being regionally or nationally significant.”

And the bad?

“The notion that we just need to maintain current highway infrastructure in a ‘state of good repair.’ … They seem to be making an argument in this Treasury report that new capacity isn’t needed,” Joyce said.

There remains no clear vision from the White House about funding highways and bridges in the long-term.

“This country is going to continue to grow in population, and in the number of people who own four-wheeled vehicles. Freight is also going to grow. As a country, we have to prepare for that and not simply by asking people to take other modes of transportation,” Joyce said.

The previous highway bill, known as SAFETEA-LU, became law in 2005 and expired in September 2009. Since then, Congress and the White House have been supplying transportation funding via a series of short-term measures. That in and of itself can be seen as a strategy, as the U.S. DOT pushes for livable communities and doles out stimulus grants.

“There seems to be this sense within the DOT and the administration that we don’t need to build any more highways, which is far from accurate,” Joyce said. “We do need to look at highway capacity.”

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See related article:
Obama plan part stimulus, part highway bill

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